Yale Boss — The Screen Children’s Gallery (1914) 🇺🇸
Yale Boss, of the Edison Company, at the fermenting age of fourteen, receives a large personal mail. It is the kind of mail that follows the screen.
by W. Stephen Bush
Yale has admirers who, taking advantage of our splendid postal facilities, assure him of their admiration frequently and emphatically. I have not been favored with a perusal of any part of this mail, but Yale had no hesitation in telling me that many of these letters started off with an affectionate appeal like “Dearie.” Yale, who has a most engaging personality and a wholesome frankness of speech, referred to these letters as “mostly mushy.” Not satisfied with this uncompromising and uncomplimentary attitude toward the sweet young dreamers who gaze fondly upon his shadow and then tell him about it by mail, Yale added this portentous and final declaration: “You know I got a real sweetheart, so I just throw those silly letters away” There is an unconscious cruelty about the adolescent male which simply appals us older people. They crack human hearts with no more compunction than we experience in smashing the shell of an ordinary nut. Yale Boss is decidedly a winner on the screen and a most likeable boy off the screen. He is tall and lithe and an athlete.
“Oh, I am in the pictures now for more than three years.” said Yale facing the interviewer with a frank smile and without a trace of embarrassment. “Somebody here saw me in the Biograph and I guess kind o’ liked me, and I have been here ever since. I think it’s easy money. I do expect to grow up into a regular big actor; why shouldn’t I?”
This being a purely rhetorical question requiring no answer. I nodded to Yale to go on.
“I like comedy, but then I like all screen work. I have been in so many pictures I don’t remember them all, but you may remember ‘The Ransom of Red Chief,’ ‘The Printers Boy’ in Dolly of the Dailies series, ‘Within the Enemy’s Lines.’” I congratulate Yale upon being a healthy, unspoiled lad. He simply cannot help being happy.
—
Yale Boss in a scene from “The Janitor’s Flirtation,” by the Edison Company.
Collection: Moving Picture World, June 1914